The Associated Press, by Jennifer Peltz
NEW YORK (AP)Jules Feiffer, a writer and cartoonist who won both the Oscar and Pulitzer Prizes, passed away on Friday. His prodigious work included plays, screenplays, children’s books, and a long-running comic strip. In keeping with his seemingly unending pattern, he published his final book barely four months ago at the age of 95.
Feiffer passed away on Tuesday from congestive heart failure in his Richfield Springs, New York, home, surrounded by his recent artwork, two cats, and friends, according to his wife, writer JZ Holden.
Holden claimed that although her husband had been ailing for a few years, he remained robust and intelligent right up until the end. And amusing.
Feiffer’s artistic flexibility allowed him to experiment with a variety of mediums, documenting urban distress, childhood curiosity, and other social trends. He contributed his keen observations of the political and interpersonal relationships that shaped his readers’ lives, along with a biting sense of humor.
According to Feiffer’s 2002 interview with the Chicago Tribune, his study focused on communication and its breakdown between parents and children, between men and women, between a government and its people, and between people who don’t handle authority well.
Feiffer won the most prestigious journalistic and filmmaking honors in the United States, including the Academy Award in 1958 for the short-subject cartoon Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-confident Munro and the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his cartoons. A retrospective of his work was presented in 1996 by the Library of Congress.
In 1998, Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “I want to make people think, feel, and, along the way, make them smile, if not laugh.” One of the finest methods to promote ideas, in my opinion, is through humor. It causes individuals to lower their guard and listen.
Feiffer was born in the Bronx on January 26, 1929. He loved to draw when he was a young child.
When he was younger, he worked for Will Eisner, the man behind the well-known comic book character The Spirit, and attended the Pratt Institute, a Brooklyn-based art and design college. According to a biography on his old website, Feiffer drew Clifford, his first comic strip, from 1949 until he was inducted into the Army in 1951. The web biography states that he was in the Signal Corps for two years.
He resumed his cartooning after leaving the Army and eventually found his way to The Village Voice, a brand-new alternative weekly newspaper at the time. On the paper’s first birthday in 1956, his work was published.
Feiffer became a mainstay of the Voice, which developed into a beacon of downtown and liberal New York. For over 40 years, his strip, simply titled Feiffer, was published there.
The Voice served as both a showcase for a comic strip known for its spidery style and scathing mockery of a gallery of New York clichés and a suitable setting for Feiffer’s combative liberal ideas.
Jules Feiffer, author, cartoonist, and lay writer, Boston, Massachusetts, January 17, 1977. (Associated Press Photo, file)
Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at New York University at the time, stated in Newsday in 1997 that it’s difficult to recall what hypocrisy looked like before Jules Feiffer drew it. In 2022, Gitlin passed away.
Readers were outraged when Feiffer left the Voice in 1997 over a pay disagreement. Until he stopped it in 2000, his strip was still syndicated.
If Feiffer was retired, he was not, however. He had a vast list of side endeavors under his belt.
His first work, Harry the Rat with Women, was released in 1963. In 1966, he began creating plays because he believed he couldn’t adequately convey the societal upheaval in six comic panels, as he subsequently told Time magazine.
One of the most prestigious awards for Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway performances, the Obie Award, was given to his debut play, Little Murders, in 1967.
In the end, he penned over a dozen plays and screenplays, from the 1980 movie adaptation of the beloved comic Popeye to the more challenging work Carnal Knowledge, which tells the tale of two college buddies and their poisonous relationships with women over a 20-year period. Carnal Knowledge, which was adapted into a 1971 film by Mike Nichols and starred Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, and Ann-Margret, was written by Feiffer. Feiffer also made contributions to Oh! Calcutta!, a long-running sensual musical revue.
However, following unsatisfactory reviews for his 1990 play Elliot Loves, Feiffer turned to the kinder world of children’s books.
In my type of play, adults were confronted with facts they didn’t want to hear. However, I felt that we had arrived at a position when adults were aware of all the bad news at this very moment. In 1995, Feiffer told National Public Radio, “I searched for people to whom I could share good news, and it seemed to me that it should be the next generation.”
Feiffer brought a wry wonder to his own children’s books, beginning with The Man in the Ceiling in 1993, after illustrating Norton Juster’s innovative 1961 book The Phantom Tollbooth. In 2017, a musical adaptation had its debut at Sag Harbor, New York’s Bay Street Theater.
When Feiffer performed an on-stage interview to go along with a showing of Carnal Knowledge in February 2019, the theater staged a surprise 90th birthday party for him.
Among other things, Feiffer has been teaching humor-writing classes at several colleges and painting watercolors of his distinctive figures in recent years. Last September, he released Amazing Grapes, a visual tale aimed at young readers.
According to his wife, he enjoyed composing it and loved the tale and illustrations.
She claimed he was a five-year-old trapped in the body of a ninety-five-year-old.